For a sample of what this course will include, see the video "Energy, Environment, and Everyday Life MOOC with University of Illinois Professor David Ruzic" - http://go.citl.illinois.edu/Energy-MOOC
This course teaches you everything you need to know about energy, the environment, and at least a number of things in everyday life. It starts by talking about energy itself and where it comes from. This includes how much we have, who has it, who uses it, and what that all means. The video clips are produced in a fast-paced multimedia format during which Professor Ruzic throws in fun and demonstrations. There are multiple-choice questions to check your understanding and some more in-depth exercises to guide you deeper into the subject.
After explaining the main things we use energy for – our cars and electronics! – fossil fuels are examined in detail. Want to really learn about fracking or pipelines? Watch these segments. The environmental effects of fossil fuels are taught as well. Global warming, acid rain, and geoengineering all are in this part of the course. Part of their solution is too. Renewables follow, with clips on solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biofuels, etc. You’ll even see Professor Ruzic in a corn field and in the middle of a stream showing how you could dam it up.
Finally, nuclear power is taught in detail – how it really works and what happens when it doesn’t work, as in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, as well as how we are making it today, which is shown here without political preconceptions. In this course, economics takes center stage. People will ultimately do whatever costs the least, so energy policy is most effective when it is targeted at the user’s wallet.
Throughout the course there are 24 segments on “How Things Work." These guides to everyday life are tremendously varied, covering everything from fireworks to making beer to what happens backstage at a theater. The course is designed to be enjoyable as well as informative. We hope you will take a look!

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From the lesson

Week 1: How It All Starts and Ends

The course starts by looking at the basic principles of energy sources at the level of the atoms and molecules. This shows how everything from wind energy to nuclear energy share the same basic concept. We then go on to blow some stuff up and explain the statistics of what forms of energy are used around the world – who has them, who uses them, and who produces them. “How Things Work” segments start with a bang (fireworks) and then get both louder (bell towers) and softer (silencers).

Taught By

David N. Ruzic

Abel Bliss Professor

Transcript

[MUSIC] We've been talking about relating all of the different forms of energy to one definition, rearrangement of chemical or nuclear bonds into a more stable state. Then we come to a particularly difficult part of power, tidal power. So there are tides across the Earth. If you sit on a dock on a sea and you wait six hours, you will go from a low tide to a high tide. You have two of these per day. The most dramatic place to witness it is the Bay of Fundy. Maine is down that way, this is Canada, this is in Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic Ocean. And in this area, the tides are so high that way over here, this is the water at low tide, this entire flat plain all the way up to the hills you see here, on the far right in this image, will get covered by water. It's actually a very amazing sight to behold. What happens is that the Earth is rotating but basically the water always has a permanent bulge that heads towards the Moon. And because of this, as the Earth rotates, you go between a high tide and a low tide. And you might think they should be every 12 hours apart, but they're about every six. Because the Earth is also pulled towards the Moon, leaving a little bit of water bulging out from the direction opposite of the Moon. So that's where the origin of tides come from. So, it's due to the gravitational attraction of the moon. And tidal power can actually be very useful. There is a large place in France that actually captures the tide coming into a bay and generates electricity very similar to a manner of hydroelectricity from it. But, how does this all relate back to rearrangements of chemical or nuclear bonds? The Moon? Let me show you. This is a really key chart. This is the binding energy of nucleons of the nuclei. And you can see here at the top that the most stable state, the most stable, is iron. And nickel is very close to that as well. So these are the most stable elements. And you can rearrange the nuclei this way, and we call that fusion. This is what the Sun does. The Sun takes hydrogen down here and turns it into helium which is more stable. And you can also have fission. This is breaking up uranium and having it go into more stable states as well. In the end, everything ends up as iron and nickel. So if this is the case, how did we ever get these heavier elements in the first place? So what we need to do is go back to a really big explosion, the original explosion. The Big Bang. The Big Bang produced the lighter elements. It had so much extra energy, that even though it was energetically unfavorable, it was possible, in time, for reactions to occur that actually created the heavier elements, particularly, in supernovas. In this process, so much energy is released that, net, we went downhill, we went to more stable states, but in the process the heavier elements were formed. Now it's very clear that all of us, and our Earth, and our solar system, are not original Big Bang products, because we have those heavier elements present. And as our solar system formed, it had to form from pieces of some actual supernova remnants. Our solar system, the Sun, and the planets, here shown to scale in terms of their individual size but clearly not shown to scale in terms of their distance away, was formed by gravitational attraction of mostly hydrogen, which is what the Sun's made out of, and then all tiny bits of this heavier stuff. But just like in a centrifuge, as all of this mixes and pulls together and starts rotating, the heavier bits get spun out. And if we look at an actual map looking down, again the planets here are not to scale but their orbits are, the heavier parts, the planets, the rocky bits, the things like you and me that have all of these elements in them were spun out as these farther planets. And, of course, some of the planets, like ours, has a moon. So, how do we relate tidal power back to the Big Bang? Well, it was those recombinations into nuclear bonds that set the whole solar system in motion. That was the energy source, the fusion that took place to create the solar system in the first place. If I actually think what will happen first, is the Sun will be done using its hydrogen and helium. So actually, before tidal friction will cause the Moon to crash into the Earth and go to a different orbit, well before that, the Sun is going to run out of its hydrogen. And the Sun will take the hydrogen, which it's converting to helium, and once that reaction is mostly over and we're kind of empty, the helium will actually fuse into carbon and oxygen and nitrogen. And then there's another fusion cycle where those elements can fuse into the heaviest ones. In that process, the Sun will engulf all of the inner planets. So that's the end of us. But it shows the steady progression of everything going to heavier elements. So the most stable elements, iron and nickel, that's what's at the center of the Earth. The center of the Earth is molten iron and nickel, because it's the thing that's left over in the end. It's the most stable element that can be made through the process of fusion, of rearranging nuclear bonds. And it's not surprising that this iron and nickel is still very warm at the center of our Earth, it's molten. So there's another energy form that can relate to all of this, and that's geothermal energy. Here's a picture of the Old Faithful geyser. Water goes down into a cavern and it's heated because there's not a volcano but they're still very hot rock from the cooling of the Earth's core and also from the radioactive elements that were produced in supernova that are now decaying and giving off heat. This heat boils the water and on some relatively regular schedule, the water boils out and geysers up into the air. You could stick a power plant on that, capture it, and make steam and make electricity. Geothermal power. The more common form of geothermal power, like this picture from my house, is where you actually put pipes into the ground to keep the warmth from the Earth to heat up water to a small degree. Actually, in this type of system where they're in a shallow trench, you're really just storing direct solar energy. But if you have one that goes much, much deeper, you actually are tapping into a little bit of that heat in the Earth's core from the molten iron and nickel, which is the most stable state of rearranging nuclear bonds. And that's what you need to know about the definition of energy. [MUSIC]

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